I’m finally almost caught up with Uncanny Issue 10. It’s a
truly stunning issue, and this story is one reason why. Visceral, intense,
harrowing—it’s the tale of a terrible family curse and the narrator’s struggle
to free himself and his descendants of it. The intensity of imagery and feeling
remind me of Alyssa Wong’s desert tale, “You’ll Surely Drown Here if You Stay”from the same issue (recommended in my last short fiction roundup). It’s an interesting pairing of stories—water and desert, constrictive
families ties, a common struggle to escape. And Markov’s story is a fine
bookend to a truly strong issue.

I’ve only just started Issue 11 of Uncanny Magazine, but
this issue also promises to be very strong. Vourvoulias’s tale is nothing short
of stunning. In the author’s own words, "El Cantar of Rising Sun" is a “code-switching, genre-hopping” epic ode to the life of one young Latino man in Philadelphia. In a remarkably
compressed space, Vourvoulias vividly brings you into the life (and heartbreak)
of Alonso and his friends and family. Vourvoulias
was an author unknown to me, but I will definitely be keeping an eye out for
her work now.

A mind-ship waits out a terrible storm, knowing that she can’t
endure much more. This is an intense, harrowing story of danger, duty, and
family; of the obligations we choose and those we can’t escape. It’s both
terribly sad and utterly lovely.

A story of the immigrant experience, set on Mars. It’s a
short but aching and potent tale, exploring the gap between generations: the children
who are at home in a new world, and the parents who still long for an old one. I’d
be lying if I said this didn’t have personal resonance for me. Iriarte’s story
is spare, sensitive, and beautiful.

And this was also wonderful. A man stumbles upon some
unusual mosaics in the city. . . This is a story that reminds us that life is a mosaic of small moments. That it's full of suffering and loss, but also more. Iriarte is now on my list of writers to watch: he tells stories that
are spare yet evocative, delicately restrained yet packed at the end with
gut-punching emotion.

And oh, this is hard science fiction combined with pure poetry.
This story follows a “swarm” of people headed on a one-way trip to Mars, all
traveling in their tiny, individual ships. Both isolated and together. They’re
all leaving for various reasons, leaving behind or escaping different things on
Earth. They forge fragile connections among themselves via radio communication
as they travel. This is a story shot through with loneliness and yearning. It’s
lyrical, evocative, and beautiful.

Beautiful and breathtaking. This is all I love about hard
sci-fi—mind-bending thought experiments, ideas that expand your notion of what
the universe could be. What if, one day, we suddenly heard the broadcasts of an
alien civilization hundreds of light years away? What if we got to know this
alien civilization through overheard snippets of their everyday life—their shopping
lists, their entertainment broadcasts, their music, and individual greetings
between one another? What if we came to consider them friends, even though they were already in the distant past? This is a story that
evokes great sweeps of distance and time. . . yet it’s also an intimate family
drama. It’s an honest examination of terrible loss, loneliness, and hope. Perhaps
the best science fiction short story I’ve read this year.

This is amazing, terrifying, propulsive, cinematic horror.
The imagery is striking and unforgettable (and you will never look at fireflies
the same way again). It’s a different twist on the horror trope of the Last
Girls—the “lucky” ones who escape the monster, the serial killer--the last ones
standing. It’s self-consciously meta and also dead-serious. The ending squeezed
my heart and took my breath away.